She Called the Bride the Help, So I Read the Bill Aloud novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Ferrand Table Account

The rental men take two hundred chairs and make her sign for her own account, and Priscilla storms the commissary with a typed apology and a threat.

On Monday morning I was elbow-deep in biscuit dough at the commissary kitchen on Franklin Street, because work was the only thing I knew how to do with my hands.

My three cooks had heard everything by nine o'clock.

Nobody said a word about it, which was how I knew they loved me.

One of them just set a cup of coffee at my elbow and went back to the stockpot.

The back door banged open, and two men in rental company shirts walked in with a hand truck.

"Morning, Miss Ferrand. We're here for the two hundred chairs."

I wiped my hands on my apron.

"Two hundred chairs?"

"From the Claiborne wedding. They're on a pickup slip." He held out a clipboard. "Ferrand Table account. Sign here, ma'am."

I read the slip.

It had the Bellwood address at the top and my company's name in the box marked Customer.

I had been at that wedding for twelve hours, and I could not remember seeing one of those chairs without a guest sitting in it.

"Did Mrs. Claiborne's office call you?" I asked.

"Her secretary set up the pickup. It goes under the account, same as the tent. Everything goes under one account, ma'am. It's easier for the families."

I was tired, and my wedding had ended in a garden gate, and there were fourteen sheet pans of biscuits waiting.

I signed the pickup slip.

"Thanks," the man said. "Big wedding. Hell of a thing, what you did with that microphone."

He winked and wheeled out the hand truck.

I stood at the steel table staring at my own signature on the clipboard copy he had left behind.

Something about it bothered me, and I could not have said what.

Then the bell on the front door rang, and I put the thought down and went to see who it was.

Reuben Falk stood at the pickup counter with his hands in the pockets of a canvas jacket.

He had slept as badly as I had. It showed in the skin under his eyes.

"I'd like to place a lunch order," he said.

"For what?"

"The Silver Street Four. We have a rehearsal this afternoon, and we're a band that eats."

"How many?" I asked.

"Six. Maybe seven," Reuben said. "Our drummer brings his brother."

I picked up my pencil.

"Smoked sausage po'boys," I said. "Or the shrimp. Do you have an allergy I should know about?"

"I'm allergic to being told what to eat," he said gravely.

That startled a laugh out of me, my first since Saturday.

His mouth moved at one corner, and he looked down at the counter.

I reached under the register for a bag, and my sleeve left a streak of flour across my jaw.

I felt it a second too late.

"You have," Reuben said, and he stopped.

"What?"

"Flour. Right there."

I touched the wrong side of my face.

"Other side."

I missed again, and he took his right hand out of his pocket and brushed his thumb along my jaw, light and quick.

His thumb was calloused, a bass player's thumb. It was warm.

Neither of us moved when he was done.

His hand was still an inch from my face, and I could hear the stockpot ticking in the back.

"I'll get the sandwiches," I said, and my voice came out too high.

"Thank you," Reuben said. He put the hand back in his pocket.

The bell over the door rang again.

I heard her voice before I saw her.

"I knew I would find you at work, dear. You always did hide in the kitchen."

Priscilla Claiborne walked in wearing a lilac linen suit and a double strand of pearls, with a cousin on each side of her.

Both cousins were older women with hats.

"I've come to settle this," my mother-in-law said. "You'll apologize to the guests in writing. I've drafted it. You'll return the cake knife, which is a family heirloom, and you will sign a statement that the invoice was a joke."

She laid a typed page on my pickup counter.

My cooks had gathered in the kitchen doorway, three women in aprons, all silent.

Reuben had turned around and was leaning on the far wall with his arms crossed. He didn't say a word.

I looked at the typed page.

"I'm not apologizing," I said.

"Joelle," Priscilla said.

"The invoice wasn't a joke. It's forty-one thousand two hundred dollars."

"We do not discuss money at the front of a shop," she said.

"You do if you owe it."

One of the cousins gasped.

Priscilla's smile did not change, but her eyes did.

"Dear, let me explain how this works. Your people have fed this town on weekends for sixty years. Your grandmother cooked in my kitchen in 1968."

"I know where my grandmother cooked."

"Then you know who allowed it," she said.

She tapped the typed page with one lacquered nail.

"I made your company, dear. Every lunch, every christening, every funeral spread on this street went to a Ferrand because a Claiborne said it was fine."

I put my hands flat on the counter so she wouldn't see them shake.

"Get out of my shop," I said.

"I will not be spoken to like the help."

"Then you shouldn't have spoken to me like one."

The oldest of my cooks stepped forward with a rolling pin and said, "Door's behind you, ma'am."

Priscilla picked up her typed page and tucked it into her handbag.

She walked to the door with her cousins at her elbows, and at the threshold she turned back.

"Everything you ever served in this town, you served on my name," she said. "Wait and see what a name is worth."

The bell rang behind her, and the door swung shut.

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